1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to wireless telecommunications. More particularly, the present invention relates to a system and method for mapping domain identifiers, common in TCP/IP protocol, to wireless telecommunication device identifiers, such as mobile identification numbers (MIN) and phone numbers.
2. Description of the Related Art
The first cellular networks were introduced in the early 1980s using analog radio transmission technologies such as AMPS (Advanced Mobile Phone System). Within a few years, cellular systems began to hit a capacity ceiling as millions of new subscribers signed up for service requiring increased airtime. Dropped calls and network busy signals became common in many areas. To accommodate more traffic within a limited amount of radio spectrum, the industry developed a new set of digital wireless technologies called TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access), GSM (Global System for Mobile), and CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access). TDMA and GSM use a time-sharing protocol to provide three to four times more capacity than analog systems. CDMA, however, is based upon a multiple access technique using orthogonal codes to keep information channels separate from each other.
A modern standard of CDMA technology, CDMA2000, supports both voice and data services over a standard CDMA communication channel. In such system, wireless telecommunication carrier networks offer data services to CDMA subscribers as an overlay Internet Protocol (IP) based application network over the CDMA infrastructure. Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is an application-layer control (signaling) protocol for creating, modifying and terminating sessions with one or more participants. In services offered under CDMA 2000, the system uses a SIP universal resource locator (URL) based user addresses in the form of: <username>@<domain>. Based on the SIP URL addressing scheme, a default domain name or ID as defined in an existing mapping table can be appended to the ENUM (RFC 3761), phone number, mobile identification number (MIN), mobile directory number (MDN), or other wireless device identifier. However, a service carrier may wish to partition its network based on different domains assigned to its subscribers and the present standard does not allow such partitioning.
Accordingly, it would be advantageous to provide a system and method that allows wireless telecommunication carriers to partition their network and deploy multiple domain IDs for their subscribers. Such service should allow the carrier's subscribers to type in a phone-number (i.e., the MIN/MDN) in order to contact another wireless device and use the same wireless data service of the carrier. Such system and method should be able to implemented on an existing wireless telecommunication infrastructure. It is thus to the provision of such a system and method of domain ID mapping of wireless telecommunication device identifiers that the present invention is primarily directed.